Computers of the past The evolution of our modern home and school computers

IBM Vintage late 1960’s Programs written in either assembly language or Fortran

Punch Card machine Before the computer could be used, the programmer had to punch the computer cards or tape

Both the cards and the tape had holes punched in them, corresponding to the directions needed. One had to be very careful not to drop a deck of cards to avoid messing up their order.

Schools and computers Schools began having computers in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Most classes were on programming, rather than on applications. I taught high school classes using BASIC, Pascal and Logo.

Some early school computers Commodore Pet Old Macintosh TRS - 80 Radio Shack Color computer

Floppy disks for data Earliest floppy’s were around 5 inches square. Eventually, they were made smaller to about 3 inches square.

Evolution continues Zip drives replaced the floppy disks. Now, USB drives have replaced the Zip drives.